On "graciously" accepting

[Greg Ross]

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

I think someone posted that "Team 0000 graciously accepts" is actually bad english, and it should really be gratefully in that instance.

I was the one who wrote that "gratefully" is probably the word that was meant when "we graciously accept" was first uttered. I didn't say it bad English, though. Grammatically, it's perfectly proper.

If I were to describe another team's acceptance as gracious, I would be saying that the team might reasonably have been expected to turn down the offer (possibly because they could do better with a different partnership), but in a show of grace, they accepted the offer. To describe ones own actions thusly, is definitely not gracious.